The 2008 election makes clear that Eagle Forum is needed more than ever before. We must rebuild the conservative movement that has been so badly fractured. That's our mission  we must be the leaders, and we are ready to lead.

Members of Eagle Forum were part of the grassroots groups that built the conservative movement from the bottom up in 1964 and nominated a little-known Senator from a then-small and faraway state, Barry Goldwater. The 27,000,000 who voted for him in 1964 suffered a devastating defeat but stayed in the trenches and "grew" the conservative movement into the mighty force that nominated and elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. When we suffered another sad defeat with Bill Clinton in 1992, conservatives rose from the ashes and elected a big-majority Republican Congress two years later, in 1994.

Conservatives can do it all again.

In Ronald Reagan's 1964 words, now is "A Time for Choosing." It's up to us to lay out the positions that must be supported by true conservatives. We must learn to recognize and reject fake conservatives such as George W. Bush, who apparently in his heart is a genuine Big Government, Big Spending, New World Order, Globalist Republican. We must not allow ourselves to be fooled again.

Today we start our search for new Conservative leaders. Here are the principles we expect them to support.

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Restore fiscal responsibility. Taxes and federal spending must be massively reduced. Both are way out of control. For starters, we must cut off the federal gravy train of disbursements to private organizations. ACORN (which received hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money) is the most outrageous of the dozens of special-interest outfits that feed at the federal taxpayers' soup kitchen. And we want an easily accessible data base on the internet for the government to tell us the favored groups that receive our money.

Prepare for the next U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. President Obama could have two or three seats to fill, and his appointees could determine our culture for the next generation.

One of the most encouraging signs that conservatives are ready for the battle to rebuild our movement was the way they united against George W. Bush's nomination of the unqualified feminist Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. The result of that uprising in Republican ranks was the confirmation of a constitutionalist Justice, Samuel Alito. Grassroots conservatives must study the problems caused by supremacist judges and be ready to do battle over every nominee.

Conservatives believe in being governed by our elected representatives, not by life-tenured judges who proclaim that the Constitution is a "living" document which judges can re-interpret according to their own biases about "emerging standards." Judges cannot be allowed to declare unconstitutional the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, the Boy Scout oath, the traditional definition of marriage, or parents' rights in public schools.

We must repudiate the activist judges and the liberals' attitude toward the courts. When the liberals can't get their radical proposals through Congress, state legislatures or the vote of the people on referenda (such as same-sex marriage), liberals say, "we will leave the decision up to the judges." That approach is unacceptable and contrary to self government. We must reject Barack Obama's view that the judges should use their power to bring about economic and social redistribution of wealth and power. Obama said he will "select" his judges based on their "empathy" with those who are poor, black, pregnant, or gay. Conservatives want judges selected on the basis of their fidelity to the Constitution they swore to obey.

Stand tall for American sovereignty and resist all encroachments. That means rejecting the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty (as Ronald Reagan did) because it would turn over control of the oceans and their riches to foreign dictators and even let them impose taxes on Americans. Standing tall for sovereignty means rejecting all UN treaties because every one sets up a monitoring committee that presumes to dictate U.S. laws and customs. Sovereignty-encroaching UN treaties include the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child and the UN Treaty on Women (known as CEDAW).

Standing enthusiastically for American sovereignty also means repudiating all plans for any kind of "economic integration" or "labor mobility" of the United States with other Western Hemisphere countries, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (endorsed in 2001); the Security and Prosperity Partnership (endorsed in 2005, in 2006, in 2007, and in 2008); the North American Plan for Avian & Pandemic Influenza (signed in 2007); and any acts whatsoever that move the United States toward a North American Union modeled on the European Union. Conservatives don't want the United States to be integrated with any other country — especially because that would force us to accept their cheap labor and a common currency.

Enforce our laws against illegal entry into our country, build a double fence on our southern border to prevent the entry of 80% of illegal drugs and incursions by armed Mexican military, reject any kind of amnesty or its euphemism "comprehensive" ("fool me twice, shame on me"), deport criminal aliens, require employers to use E-verify, and prosecute employers who violate our laws and those who peddle false documents. Conservatives also want to stop giving driver's licenses, in-state college tuition rates and other taxpayer-paid benefits to illegal aliens, and to terminate George W. Bush's plans to put illegal aliens in Social Security.

Conservatives want to end the importation of cheap labor from other countries to take U.S. jobs, whether it's called "guest worker" (a lie because the "guests" never go home) or additional H-1B visas (a practice rampant with fraud). Conservatives want an end to "anchor babies" and to "sanctuary cities."

Conservatives want our immigration and the path to U.S. citizenship to be based on American sovereignty and available only to those who want to be Americans and speak English. Conservatives want English to be legislated as our official national language because that is the best route to e pluribus unum.

Make foreign and military policies serve the national security of the United States. Advice from George Washington is still timely: "If we desire to secure peace . . . it must be known that we are at all times ready for war." Resort to war must be the absolute last step after all other avenues fail. As Margaret Thatcher reminded us, Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

The best way to protect our national security and the lives of Americans is to retain U.S. military supremacy, as called for in repeated Republican Party Platforms. Our guiding star must always be what's best for the national security of the United States of America.

The Constitution does not authorize our leaders to resolve the many injustices that take place in foreign countries. Trying to redraw the boundary lines on other continents, or to establish democracy in nations that have no experience with self-government, is the discredited and failed policy expounded by Woodrow Wilson, and conservatives should not be fooled by it.

Address the problem of the public schools, which annually spend $500 billion of taxpayers' money at all levels of government, and have the biggest influence on our culture and the attitudes of the next generation because 89% of children are in public schools. Constitutionally, the federal government should not be spending money for public schools, but until we can restore local control we must assure that the federal government does no harm, and we must try to prevent the schools from doing harm.

The federal government's attempt to prescribe curricula and tests has been largely a failure. There is no reason to believe that future attempts will score better results. Parents must demand that schools give first priority to teaching reading by phonics, math, and accurate American history.

One area where Congress could take constructive action is to condition receipt of federal funds on respect for parents' constitutional rights over the education of their own children. Those rights are widely trashed by public schools and the federal courts (such as the notorious Ninth Circuit decision which ruled that parents' rights over the care and custody of their own children "does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door"). Federal court decisions support public schools in denying parents' rights to protect their own children from indoctrination about homosexual practices, Islam, evolution, sexual mores, and privacy-invading questions about sex, drugs, and suicide.

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Protect and promote Marriage, the fundamental institution for society to be stable, law-abiding, productive, and prosperous. Conservatives should support U.S. and state constitutional amendments to protect the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and also support the federal Defense of Marriage Act to protect against judicial mischief.

Conservatives should develop plans to remedy the social problem that 25 million children are now growing up in households without their own father, and the fact that most social ills (including illegal drugs, crime, unmarried pregnancies, school dropouts, and runaways) come from mother-headed households.

Conservatives should be alert and ready to do battle against all attacks on marriage. The groups attacking traditional marriage include: (a) the homosexual movement (which seeks public recognition of same-sex marriage, homosexual adoptions, and other benefits that belong only to marriage), (b) the entertainment industry (which constantly makes sex outside of marriage more attractive than sex inside of marriage), (c) sex education classes (which validate "safe sex" for unmarried teens,) and (d) the feminist movement (which promotes mother-headed households through the use of taxpayer-paid incentives for divorce and illegitimacy) and lesbian-headed households (through same-sex marriage).

In addition to all the moral and social reasons to support marriage, conservatives should recognize the overwhelming political reason. Married women vote conservative and women who are single, divorced, or single mothers vote for the political party that promises more welfare handouts. When the husband is absent, women need Big Brother Government to provide the benefits and pay the bills. In the 2008 election, unmarried women voted for Barack Obama by a stunning 70% to 29% margin according to the Edison/Mitofsky National Election Poll published by CNN. This was a bigger margin than Obama received among young voters or Hispanic voters. Unmarried women similarly supported Democrats for the U.S. House by a 64% to 29% margin.

Recognize that the economy is a major issue  and that it is the responsibility of our government to protect American workers from the protectionism practiced by other countries which give their workers unfair advantages over us. Americans can compete when we have a level playing field, but there is nothing level about the field of international trade today.

The loss of U.S. jobs was the number-one reason why Republicans lost in 2008. Real conservatives must not allow the conservative movement to be "bought" by the multinational corporations, most of whose executives have abandoned patriotism in order to enhance their profits by using cheap Chinese manufacturing labor at 30 cents an hour, or cheap Indian techies who work for a fourth of U.S. wages. Real conservatives will stand up for middle-class Americans and the jobs that give them a decent living and a stake in the future.

Real conservatives will demand a level playing field by rejecting the attacks on our sovereignty by the World Trade Organization, which has ruled against us 40 out of 47 times and now is punishing us for our law against internet gambling because it interferes with free trade in recreational services. Real conservatives will reject the trade agreements that allow foreign countries to pretend to reduce their tariffs on our goods but substitute an equivalent border tax called the VAT (Value Added Tax) that discriminates against U.S. products. Real conservatives will reject the trade agreements that allow foreign countries to subsidize their exports to the U.S. by rebating their domestic taxes, while U.S. companies pay very high corporate taxes. Real conservatives will reject a trade agreement that binds us to admit Mexican trucks to all our roads even though their trucks and drivers do not meet the safety requirements of U.S. trucks and drivers.

Develop the courage to battle the destructive feminist movement. American men must stop being intimidated by the feminists and recognize that their goals are anti-family, anti-conservative, and very harmful to society.

Feminists rank the number-one woman's right as the right to kill her unborn baby. Conservatives must stand for life as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.

Conservatives should realize that the feminists, as Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield so eloquently explained in his book Manliness, are anti-men, anti-male, anti-masculine, anti-marriage, anti-motherhood, and anti-morality; in fact, they are nihilists. Feminists have not only declared war on the patriarchy, they are determined to convert us into a matriarchy (as they have already done with the welfare class, resulting in poverty, unemployment, and illegitimacy).

Feminists pursue their goals mostly on taxpayers' money. They use the federal financial incentives in the multi-billion-dollar welfare and child-support agencies to promote divorce, non-custodial parents, and mother-headed households (where most social ills originate). They use the federal financial handouts in Joe Biden's billion-dollar-a-year Violence Against Women Act to promote divorce and the feminist ideology that men are naturally batterers and women are naturally victims. They promote a gender-neutral military despite the fact that it reduces combat readiness, forces men to lie about female performance, and promotes other immoral behavior.

The feminists use their clout in the Department of Education, the teachers unions, and the public school system to enforce all kinds of policies that are detrimental to boys and men. Their malicious enforcement of Title IX has forced the elimination of 460 college wrestling teams and hundreds of other men's athletic teams, so that colleges and universities are now about 40% male and 60% female. The Democratic Party Platform and Hillary Clinton are still promoting the old Equal Rights Amendment (that would constitutionalize same-sex marriage and abortion funding), which was declared dead by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982.

These are some of the conservative principles that conservative leaders should sign on to if they want the support of the grassroots. Conservatives must direct their appeal to Americans who love our country, respect our Constitution, and live by the tenets of Judeo-Christian morality.

Big Media Elected Barack Obama
Big Media pulled out all their stops to elect Barack Obama by withholding from the American people the truth about his radical record and associates. Big media and the presidential debates ignored many front-burner issues important to millions of Americans. Pew Research confirms that 70% of Obama's media was positive and 60% of McCain's media was negative.

The source of money has always been fair game for anybody to talk about in political campaigns. Why didn't Big Media assign their investigative reporters to trace the hundreds of millions of dollars that might be illegally flowing to the Obama campaign from foreign sources?

By excluding abortion and same-sex marriage from national debate, Big Media kept the voters from knowing that Obama, as chairman of the Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee, killed the "Born Alive" bill, thereby depriving babies born alive from botched abortions of medical care and nutrition. Big Media didn't want a repetition of Obama's embarrassing handling of these issues in the Saddleback dialogue.

The issue of illegal aliens was censored out of the presidential debates and other coverage. The voters were kept oblivious to the fact that Obama favors giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens and John McCain does not. This issue is so powerful with the voters that it played a major role in the dumping of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and the unprecedented recall of California Governor Gray Davis. It could have done likewise to Obama.

How many times did you hear that Obama will cut taxes on 95% of Americans? Big Media never told the public that is a big lie because 40% of Americans don't pay any federal income taxes at all. Talking about "95%" means Obama intends to increase government handouts, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), to non-tax-paying Americans. That would implement his promise to "spread the wealth around."

Big Media threatened to hang a scarlet letter on anyone who dared to mention Obama's middle name. Funny thing, in all the years that I spent criticizing the disarmament/appeasement policies of JFK's and LBJ's Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, nobody ever said I was unfair to use his strange middle name.

But Obama is different. Big Media have cloaked him with a security blanket that not only protected him from criticism, but viciously attacked anybody who told the truth about Obama's life story in Indonesia, Hawaii, Kenya, or Chicago.

On October 15, the New York Times ran a front-page above-the-fold "news" article threatening McCain that Big Media will not tolerate any negative attacks on Obama, such as talking about Obama's relationship with the 1960s terrorist Bill Ayers. The Times warned McCain and his supporters that it is unacceptable to make "strong political attacks" on Obama or be "sharply personal" or even use an "angry tone." But the voters had a right to know who are and were Obama's associates. Old adages are still valid: "Birds of a feather flock together" and "A man is known by the company he keeps."

Why didn't Big Media tell us that Obama launched his political campaign in the Chicago living room of Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground, famous for bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon? Why didn't Big Media tell us about the relationship of Obama on school issues with Ayers, who as a Professor of Education is now working to replace the three R's with a fourth, Rebellion against the U.S. social and economic structure?

When Sean Hannity aired a program about "Obama and Friends," the New York Times rushed forth to defend Obama's ties with Bill Ayers and to attack Hannity's program as "partisan" and "provocative." We were not supposed to be partisan or provocative about Obama.

How could Obama sit in a church for 20 years where Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke hatefully about whites and cursed America as a racist country? Yet, Big Media claimed it is racist for anyone to criticize Obama's long and personal association with Jeremiah "damn America" Wright.

Why didn't Big Media dissect the revelations and biases in Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father, with the same journalistic curiosity they used about Sarah Palin's wardrobe? Why didn't we hear more about Obama's friendship with the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who was part of a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii?

Why weren't we given details about Obama's financial relationship with Tony Rezko, the Chicago fixer now in prison?

In addition to tremendous, unprecedented amounts of suspect foreign money that Obama had to spend and the overwhelming support given to him by the media, any analysis of why he won must acknowledge his skill as a community organizer who was trained by the leftwing radical, Saul Alinsky. Obama's political game plan simply carried out the strategy and tatics set forth in Alinsky's book Rules for Radicals.